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Talk about a relevant use of social marketing! This year, Butterball is targeting tech-savvy consumers-- especially those who plan to try cooking a Thanksgiving turkey for the first time-- by taking the company's 27-year-old "Turkey Talk-Line" digital.

In addition to running its traditional toll-free hotline, which has become indispensable to more than 100,000 amateur cooks each year trying to master the art of cooking a turkey, Butterball now offers home cooks the chance to receive "turkey texts" on their mobile phones.

Consumers can choose to receive text messages containing reminders for when to buy or thaw their turkeys, shopping list alerts or tips on how to prepare and cook a turkey. They also can quickly connect to Butterball experts manning the Turkey Talk-Line for more advice on preparing the perfect bird.

A mobile site features more recipes, tips and how-to's, as well as calculators and conversion info to help consumers figure out cooking times. And blogs at Butterball.com offer more personal anecdotes of memorable meals.

The Turkey Talk-Line has served as a powerful marketing tactic for nearly three decades, and this move into social media seems smart and logical. The company is providing its customers with relevant, accessible ways to talk turkey.

Posted by Elisabeth at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

President-elect Barack Obama is quickly shaping up as the most charismatic national political figure since John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan (depending on your political bent), so I suppose its only natural that marketers would want to grab a bit of that charisma for their campaigns.

Already in Chicago, Loyola University has run a newspaper ad reaching out to potential students with a takeoff of Obama’s “Yes We Can” slogan. Former rapper and now businessman Sean “Diddy” Combs is coming out with a new fragrance for men and telling the Wall Street Journal that it reflects the new image of African-American men portrayed by Obama.

I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more efforts to grab some of the Obama marketing coattails. If you’re thinking about doing it, be careful. Like any other technique, if done wrong – in an inauthentic or forced manner – it will not work and could do you, your company and its products or services more harm than good.

Posted by John at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been in LinkedIn for several years and have even raced people I know to see who could amass more contacts there. But I really hadn’t given it much thought as a marketing tool until today.

Patrick Crane, vice president of marketing and advertising at LinkedIn, spoke at a luncheon of the Business Marketing Association’s Chicago chapter about the idea of using the business networking site as a marketing tool.

His advice, to small businesses especially, is that the first step in marketing through LinkedIn is to build your network of first level connections, people who truly know your company, service or products, and trust your company. They become the links to new customers. Get them to write recommendations for your company, he added.

LinkedIn also has been rolling out other ways to help business use it as a marketing tool. It has a new research group that can assemble what are essentially focus groups for you or do wider research.

It’s also added applications in partnership with the likes of Google and others to enable more online collaboration among Linkedin members. One application lets you see who in your network will be in a city you may be traveling to, for example. Another lets you post business presentations, while a third can link to your blog.

Crane drew clear distinctions between a professional network like LinkedIn and social networks like Facebook and insisted LinkedIn would never become social like Facebook. Unspoken in those comments is that Facebook seems to be trying to become more business oriented, a strategy that may put the two networking companies on a colison course at some point.

Posted by John at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There’s a great scene in the John Wayne version of The Alamo (my favorite version of that classic tale) in which Wayne’s character, Davy Crockett, tells Jim Bowie and William Travis that they’re all colonels in some army or militia or other and if they insist on calling each other colonel no one will know who’s talking to whom.

I often think of that scene as the first recorded instance of title inflation. The New York Times discussed title inflation in a great story Oct. 26 about how companies have more president titles than they ever have, presidents of divisions, regions, product lines.

More and more companies also have chief marketing officers these days. The concept behind calling someone CMO is to elevate the importance of marketing in a corporate structure and, perhaps as important, put the head of marketing at the right hand of a CEO as he or she is setting corporate policy and direction.

But is it working out that way? Does having a CMO title elevate the role of marketing, or ensure that it gets more resources? Should it be preserved, or is it a title that may not live up to its potential?

We’re going to be taking an in-depth look at that in Marketing News sometime in early 2009, but in the meantime, let me know what you think, and what you’ve experienced.

Posted by John at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We’ve begun planning and researching for our year-end issue of Marketing News which will include a look at marketing hits and misses for 2008. What would you put in each of those categories?

Did Barack Obama score a hit with his 30-minute TV buy on several networks, attracting on the order of 33 million viewers?

How about john McCain and his use of Joe the Plumber? Or maybe the biggest marketing hit of the year politically should be credited to Saturday Night Life which scored a ratings comeback thanks to Tina Fey aka Sarah Palin. I watched some of those and was struck by how unfunny some of the non-political skits were. The show still isn’t as good as it once was, in my opinion.

What about marketing hits in other areas? With the economy such a mess now it’s sometimes hard to think about what happened earlier this year, so help us out with your thoughts. What was the big consumer good product marketing hit of the year? How about in BtoB or marketing research breakthroughs?

We’ll also be featuring a marketing quiz in our year-end issue, so start cramming for that. Who knows, maybe some of your suggestions here will find their way into the quiz.

Posted by John at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)